My Life in the Sea of Cars. James Murray

speck of creation, a fluttering feather, a gathering storm, a clenching and unclenching fist, a receding tide that gradually reveals, that gives air.

      I’m taking my time with this car thing, aren’t I? I’m getting there, my friend. It is a big thing I’m giving you, and I want to make sure you can take it in. I feel you’re waiting at the crossroads, revving your engine, ready to run me over.

      Jude always lets me know that she and her husband use their car sparingly. She often points out they have only the one car between them. I feel uncomfortable when she does this. I’ve never talked to her about cars. What has she been told about me? A few weeks ago she said to me, ‘You don’t have a car for environmental reasons. Is that right?’

      ‘Oh, for many reasons. I might write a book about it one day.’

      ‘But you get lifts in cars, don’t you?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Well, there is a flaw in your argument.’

      ‘Hey?’

      ‘If you get lifts in cars there is obviously a flaw in your argument.’

      My dear friends. My dear car-driving friends. I don’t want to hurt you. Ease up. I’ll be gentle with you. I’m preparing the way for you.

      I’m easing up here, and easing down, easing into this sandbank. I can feel my heart and mind slowly unwinding. If I stay still, the cloudy water inside me settles and clears. Over the days, my consciousness gains a focus on things I didn’t know existed.

      I live near the tidal estuary of Rapid Creek in Darwin. At low tide there is a vast expanse of exposed wet sand, and I like to walk out to the water’s edge and watch the sea retreat or advance. There is a rock island, bigger than a football oval and about three kilometres from the foreshore, that people call Old Man Rock. At high tide it is submerged, and boats can run aground on it, but Darwin’s big tides – often six or seven metres – reveal it for half the day. On the lowest tides of the year, if you have a spare two hours at the right time, you can walk out to it and back without getting your knees wet. Whenever I’m at the beach I look to it. If I’m travelling down Chapman Road through the suburb of Rapid Creek, heading to the beach, I look at the ocean, and if it isn’t high tide I see Old Man Rock. Above the black road is green sea, brown island, green sea, blue sky. If the tide is right out, yellow sand goes between the road and water.

      Beth and her family have lived on Chapman Road for fifteen years. I was in her house and I mentioned Old Man Rock in passing.

      ‘What’s that? Old Man Rock?’

      ‘The island out there,’ I said, pointing in the right direction through the living room wall.

      ‘What island?’

      ‘You know, the island out there. The rock island. It’s about three kilometres out to sea. Submerged at high tide.’

      But neither Beth nor her daughter knew what I was talking about. They frowned and shook their heads. Eventually I led them out the front door and out the gate and onto the road and I pointed again.

      ‘Oh!’ said Beth. ‘I suppose I’ve seen it …’

      Of course she’s seen it. She has seen it ten times a week for fifteen years.

      ‘… but I’ve never really noticed it.’

      What does she notice? She is a lawyer, and notices details at work. She notices the mess her daughter left in the kitchen, and what her friend was wearing last night, and what happened in the TV show. She would notice if someone in the office had odd socks or mismatched earrings. She can’t notice everything. Now Old Man Rock has been pointed out to her she will start noticing it.

      You can’t notice everything and sometimes you don’t see something until it is pointed out to you. It might be too big and too close and you can’t get perspective. You might look past it, distracted, preoccupied. You might be blinded, or fooled, or somewhere else, but you know you don’t know everything, and that you could be surprised.

      There might be a favourite drawing you see every day on your waIl, a drawing of a staircase. You’ve always seen the staircase going up. One day someone says it is going down.

      ‘No, it is going up!’ you say, but he points out why he sees it going down and suddenly you are seeing it going down, and you never see it going up again.

      I make my fire and cook my dinner while there is enough daylight to see into the billy. I don’t keep the fire going after dinner. A fire is attractive, mesmerising, and gives me good visibility in its ring of light, but its brightness kills my night vision for outside the ring. Without a fire, the starlight is perfectly adequate.

      I walk up to a rock platform overhanging the sky-reflecting water. I let these words out silently, not disturbing the surface, going directly to the stars.

      I love being here. I love the free and easy lifestyle. These pools! This pool, fifty metres long and twenty metres wide, curls around a corner and is mostly very deep. To swim with goggles through the great sunlit space beneath its surface! There is a section of huge submerged boulders and fallen trees, and many fish as long as my arm. Today, a turtle mooched beneath me, oblivious. Halfway is a long string of immaculate gems, of pools, beaches, gorges and falls, of salubrious abundance and ease. No mozzies, no crocs. No worries.

      It stays warm at night. I’m freckly and burn easily so I wear a hat and big shirt in the sun, but when the sun goes down they come off. I rarely wear pants. I am entirely alone so my nakedness can’t bother anyone. I sleep naked on the bare sand.

      My skin comes from my seven Celtic great-grandparents. Independently of each other they all left their ancestral lands and language in the second half of the nineteenth century. That great uprooting was passed in convulsive shocks through my grandparents and parents to me, and is manifest in my rootlessness, the rootlessness of white Australians.

      I can’t be in this country without being aware of the people who were here before me, before the whitefella came.

      I’ve spent many days on this creek over many years, and I’ve never seen a person here. In other years I have seen boot prints, and I know a bushwalking tour group has come this way. I don’t see footprints other than my own and I don’t run into blackfellas, but there are paintings here and there of turtle and fish and emu, and their presence screams at me.

      I don’t want to tell you exactly where I am. I have permission to be here. I come to this ancient aboriginal land as a tourist, a bushwalker.

      Over the years I meet people of this country, but I meet them in towns and communities and not out here. Their parents and grandparents and fifty thousand years of ancestors would have come here occasionally, to fish and hang out, to sleep on the beach. The beaches by this pool could sleep fifty people, their dreams intermingling, solidifying into culture, seeping into rocks, rising like smoke to the sky.